


John's Incredible Breath

by ChainSmokesPens



Category: Original Work
Genre: Comedy, F/M, Falling In Love, Flash Fic, Humor, Love Letters, Romance, contemporary fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28572243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChainSmokesPens/pseuds/ChainSmokesPens
Summary: Prompt: [SP] "I miss your face every morning. I don't miss your breath."





	John's Incredible Breath

Dear John,

I know this is isn't what you expected. And I know that as you continue to read, you'll only have more queries I won't be here to answer. Agitation that I won't be able to repose. I believe, even you, monument of masculinity that you are, with pectorals like brass and a back that could crush boulders, may even loose a tear from an underutilized duct.

It's sad for me to admit, but even as I write this I'm loosing tears of my own. And I can't help but recall the rain. How we first met in the café, narrowly escaping the downpour of the hurricane, and how we were stuck inside for three hours. It was raining when you found me in the park after my relationship with Nathaniel concluded in his unfaithfulness. As recent as it was, you surely remember how it rained when you proposed.

I hope that like the rain cleanses the ground it falls upon, and tears shed cleanse the soul of pain, my words will reach you. Reach into you, flowing like a river, baptizing you and providing more comfort that trauma.

I'm sorry for prattling. I know you can handle what I'm about to divulge. You always were the strong one. Even now, I laugh when I think of the story you told me of when you went trick-or-treating with your friends. How an eighteen-year-old approached you three demanding your candy. You, all pudgy, all brave, all four-and-a-half feet of you, seized the assailant by his testicles and shouted for your companions to run. You'd said it was the most dramatic five minutes of your life.

And here I am, competing with that cherished childhood memory with my own desire to drag this out.

If only I had your heart, John. If only I had your courage. It pains me to even have to do this. You know how fragile I can be. Why, when I'd heard Nathaniel had been caught with my sister, my heart couldn't take it. And when I'd finally been released from the hospital, I felt as fragile as a porcelain teapot.

You remember, don't you John? How I spent the next two weeks in a wheelchair, afraid that the foundation of my body, much like the foundation of my love, would prove untrustworthy and give out beneath me? How, when I was forced to leave the chair, I only walked with timid steps. My mother said I was like a mouse dancing across the tips of knives, I was so cautious.

I worry for you, John. You yourself have proven indominable, possibly immortal. To recount your experiences is akin to listing the deeds of Heracles or Gilgamesh. In your childhood, you leapt from the roof of your home to fall into a snowbank, despite your home having three floors. You outran dogs as you cut across private lots on your way to school. At thirteen you were regularly engaged in fights with men twice your age. You missed a pitch during a baseball game in high school and splintered the bat with nothing more than a bending motion. You went a week without eating in college just to prove it could be done.

Now I know I've said too much; you knew of these things already.

Please, my love, my everything, forgive me for what I'm about to divulge. For this revelation, indominable as you've proven to be, may break even you.

Your breath is the worst. It is akin to the foulest shit I've ever been exposed to in the most literal sense I can describe.

If only the rain, the embodiment of our love from its inception to its completion, were mouthwash that could purge your teeth and all the foulness they contain. Oh, that these purifying rains could baptize, if not exorcize, such a foulness.

Oh that the hurricane took me before we met! Oh that I'd chosen to stay with Nathaniel, despite his infidelities! All to avoid your breath, my precious one.

I wish that as you trick-or-treated with your friends, every home you approached provided them with candy and you with toothbrushes. Oh, that that eighteen-year-old would have killed you!

I wish so deeply that the heartbreak of losing Nathan had rendered me a vegetable, that you may find the burden of my care too unappealing to attempt. That my porcelain bones would shatter and spare me the fate of laying with you in bed. In the same room. On the same floor.

That all the trials you've overcome in your thirty-five years of life would have robbed me of this sorrow. The tears I shed when you proposed were not tears of joy, but misery at the thought that I would be forced to spend the remainder of my years with you, lips locked together, as they were in the moment, tasting the plaque leaving your mouth and clinging to my teeth.

I'm sorry, my love, but you don't know the fear I experienced with you on a day-to-day basis. That we kiss before I friends and I can't help but regurgitate. That I continue my façade of a sexual fascination with your feet, if only that I be as far away from your mouth as possible during coitus. That our children, blessed as I am that I didn't let you impregnate me, heaven knows they'd be little petri dishes as well, would sob themselves to sleep when you would kiss them goodnight.

In the top draw of your work desk you will find mouthwash, an electric toothbrush, a spool of floss, and a guide I'd acquired from the dentist's office on proper oral hygiene.

Goodbye, John. I'll miss your face every morning, but not your toe-curlingly repugnant breath.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel this one would have been funnier if the prompt were the last thing you saw.


End file.
